1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a commodity information management program for managing commodity information with using commodity classification codes, a computer readable medium that stores the program and a data structure of a commodity classification master database handled by the program.
2. Prior Art
As well known, commodity classification codes are employed to retrieve commodity information effectively. The commodity classification code is information that shows the attribute of the commodity, and the same commodity classification code is given to the commodity information of commodities having the same attribute.
Further, there are large and small concepts for the attribute. An attribute of a large concept contains an attribute of a small concept. For example the attribute of “noodle” contains the attributes of “soba”, “udon”, “Chinese noodle” and “spaghetti”. Therefore, a commodity classification code showing an attribute of a low-level concept belongs to a commodity classification code of a high-level concept. As a result, the commodity classification code constructs a code system having a tree-type hierarchical structure as a whole, and the number of the commodity classification codes applied to the commodity information is equal to the number of the attributes applied to the commodity.
In recent years, software packages for managing commodity information using such a commodity classification code have been developed by software venders, and the packages are mainly sold to users, such as a retailer and an electronic commerce contractor.
This kind of software package is generally provided with three commodity classification master databases for a high level, a middle level and a low level. A user is able to create the code system having the three-layer construction by registering commodity classification codes that are originally defined by a user to the respective databases.
Further, this kind of software package is provided with a commodity master database that defines correspondence between commodity information about a commodity treated by a user and three commodity classification codes for a high level, a middle level and a low level with respect to the commodity.
When a user designates three commodity classification codes of the high, middle and low levels and executes a search with the commodity classification codes as a search condition on a computer on which the software package is running, the user can extract only the commodity information about the commodity having the attributes corresponding to the designated commodity classification codes. Therefore, a user can extract commodity information efficiently as compared with a method by searching commodity information simply.
However, according to the conventional software package described above, the levels of the commodity classification code could not be larger than three. For this reason, a large-scale retailer such as a department store needed to reconstruct the database system such that a code system of four or more levels can be created with great expense.
Further, according to the conventional software package described above, a code devoid of meaning had to be set in the third level for commodities that requires two levels of the commodity classification codes only.
Still further, when a user moves a certain commodity classification code to another level, a user had to update a plurality of commodity classification code master databases and had to rewrite the commodity classification code in the commodity master database. Therefore, maintenance of the commodity classification code requires extremely large effort. Moreover, a failure of maintenance causes mismatch between the commodity classification code and the commodity information.